All Just Bananas in the Meme Machine
That damn duct-taped banana is back in the news. Comedian, the “artwork” by Maurizio Cattelan, just sold for $6.2 MILLION as a digital certificate of ownership and authentication. No actual banana included, naturally — it rots, you see. Gotta love the art world’s particular brand of insanity, right?
But here’s the real kicker: this isn’t art, it’s a meme. A goddamn performance art meme that’s exploded into the mainstream. It taps into our obsession with absurdity, with viral hype, with the grotesque inequality of the art market, our digital landscape and the arbitrary nature of value in a world saturated in consumerism, celebrity, and digital consumption.
Think about it. You don’t need to see Comedian in person. You just need to know about it. It spreads like wildfire online, sparking outrage, think pieces (like the one you’re probably skimming), and endless jokes. The conversation is the art. And that’s a mirror that reveals our cultural landscape — as it is, not as it could be.
This banana is a perfect representation of our age of internet virality. A symbol of the joke economy we exist in, where “owning” something doesn’t mean possessing it physically, but participating in the discourse around it, contributing to its “meme-ification”. Hell, I am contributing to its meaning right now.
The crypto bro who bought it? He’s not buying a banana; he’s buying a moment, a piece of internet history, a conversation starter, he is buying clout. He’s buying the chance to be part of the spectacle.
We’re so desperate for meaning that we’ll find it even in a rotting piece of fruit. Or rather, the idea of a rotting piece of fruit, preserved forever in the digital ether. That has to mean something, right? …Right?